A TOUCH OF FROST

NOTETHIS PROGRAMME has been temporarily withdrawn for re-editing.
The broadcaster ITV has objected to the use of its copyright material and it is being removed.
The trailer does not infringe ITV’s copyright and can be seen below.
See the articleITV Bid To Gag Rebecca Television for more on this story.

THE NORTH Wales Child Abuse Tribunal is the only full-scale public inquiry ever to be held in Britain into sexual and physical abuse in care homes.

It cost £14 million and produced a substantial 937 page report in 2000.

Rebecca Television has long argued that the Tribunal, chaired by the retired High Court judge Sir Ronald Waterhouse, was “flawed”.

The key piece of evidence concerns a man called Des Frost.

Frost was a senior executive in the privately run Bryn Alyn Community in Wrexham whose boss John Allen was gaoled for child abuse in the 1990s.

Des Frost was potentially a key witness for the Tribunal because he claimed he told police about Allen’s activities a full decade before he was brought to book.

But Frost was never called to give evidence — and the Tribunal prevented the Welsh television company HTV from broadcasting his testimony.

The upshot was that the Waterhouse Tribunal never heard Frost’s evidence.

As a result, the North Wales Police was cleared of any failure to bring the abuse on its patch to an end ten years before it actually did so.

The video, which has been temporarily withdrawn, presents the interview that was censored.

The trailer gives some idea of the tone of the programme.

The ITV Wales current affairs programme Wales This Week also showed part of the censored interview in November 2012.